Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Social media platforms are engaged in censorship. (Insert shocked face here.) The high-profile target last week was the president of the United States.
The president’s re-election campaign posted a video in which Donald Trump claimed that children are “almost immune” from the coronavirus.
Facebook and Twitter said that statement is not true and so they removed the post.
We can argue all day whether children are “almost immune” from the virus because we can argue all day about the meaning of “almost immune.”
(What is the definition of “is” again?)
What’s less debatable is whether social media — or any other media — have the right to censor statements made by the president, or anybody else.
The answer, without question, is yes. They do it all the time.
To be clear, if Trump had told The Eastern New Mexico News in an interview that children are “almost immune” from COVID-19, we would have published that statement. We might have asked him where he received this information, we may have added the voice of a medical professional disputing the statement, we might even have pulled information from the Centers for Disease Control that says about 1.7 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases have been found in children.
But if the president of the United States wants to dispute the CDC and other medical experts, we will provide a platform for him to do that.
If the president called us up and said, “The moon really is made of green cheese,” we would also report that. Not because we think it’s true, but because he’s the president and his statements are news. Ultimately our readers get to decide whether he has credibility and whether he meant “green cheese” literally.
But while Trump’s status as the leader of the (relatively) free world allows him voice in our newspaper and most newspapers and on most TV stations, the same doesn’t hold for everyone.
Anna H. Bruun of Norway, for example, has an important cause she wants our newspaper to further.
She wants to help motherless babies, the less privileged and widows. She is dying of cancer and won’t be able to do this work herself anymore.
She has money — a buncha buncha euros in a bank in Burkina Faso, all earned legitimately by her deceased husband, a gold merchant. If we want to take up the cause, with her money, all we need to do is contact her for information about transferring the funds.
Not only did we decline to help, we decided not to share the information with our readers (until now). That’s partly because she doesn’t live around here, mostly because we suspect she might be up to no good.
One might argue it’s news anytime someone with a buncha buncha euros wants to help motherless babies. But we decided not to report it. Because freedom.
Granted, that’s also censorship and we’re guilty.
The message is this: Every news outlet in America, along with every social media platform, engages in censorship — we prefer the term “news judgment” — on a regular basis.
It’s up to the news consumer to decide where the most reliable information can be found.
— David Stevens
Publisher
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